App review: Super Monsters Ate My Condo

GROWTH SPURT: Like the original game, Super Monsters Ate My Condo is a great time-waster.

Relevant offers

Last year, PC World reviewed a little mobile game from Wellington studio PikPok called Monsters Ate My Condo.

REVIEW:
That game, while simple in concept, was great fun. There were monsters of different colours, and condos of different colours.

The monsters were hungry and you had to feed them condos of the appropriate colour from a tower in the middle, by swiping condos in the direction of the monster.

While feeding them, you also had to line up matches of three or more condos of the same colour in that tower. Doing so would earn you 'special' condos that could be used to activate monsters' abilities.

The core mechanics of its BAFTA-nominated sequel, Super Monsters Ate My Condo, are exactly the same as that first game. Same monsters, much of the same music and artwork, same fat lady singing when the game is over (no, really).

The difference is that Super Monsters Ate My Condo introduces a progression system.

Instead of playing the same game over and over again, you're working toward goals and accomplishing them. To progress, you might have to earn a certain number of points, activate a certain monster's power, or line up a certain number of matches.

Each game has a time limit of two minutes, but you can also fail in a couple of other ways.

There are special nuke condos, which you have to neutralise by making a match near them. If you don't and the nuke explodes, it's game over. You can also trigger the game over screen if your tower falls down, which it can do if you're not careful when swiping away your condos.

Like the original game, Super Monsters Ate My Condo is a great time-waster, and quickly overtook Peggle as my mobile game of choice for bus rides.

But it has a steep difficulty curve - it only took me a few levels before I got stuck playing the same one over and over and over.

That said, in the first game it wouldn't have bothered me, because every time I played I was essentially playing the same game again and again regardless.

It only bothers me now because it makes progressing difficult.

Super Monsters Ate My Condo is a free game, and earns its money through microtransactions.

Fortunately, they're not annoying ones - you can absolutely play through the game, and keep playing, without purchasing a thing.